Terrance Hayes and Krysten Hill in conversation with Nicole Callihan during the Headliner night of the Tell It Slant Poetry Festival on September 20, 2025.
The festival took place on the grounds of the Emily Dickinson Museum.
Over 100 people showed up for the headliner event, and 150 people attended virtually via Zoom.
Terrance Hayes’s most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A collection of poems, So To Speak, and collection of essays, Watch Your Language, are forthcoming on Penguin in 2023. Hayes is a Silver Professor of English at New York University.
Krysten Hill is the author of How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), which received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. She has featured poetry at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Boston Book Festival, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Blacksmith House, and other places. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series. Poetry Magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Winter Tangerine Review, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the 2020 Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship, 2023 Vermont Studio Center Residency, 2024 SWWIM Residency, and Kenyon Review’s 2024 Peter Taylor Fellowship. She is currently the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University.
Nicole Callihan has two recent poetry collections: chigger ridge (The Word Works 2024) and SLIP (Saturnalia 2025). Other books include This Strange Garment (Terrapin 2023), as well as the chapbooks Downtown, A Study in Spring, and ELSEWHERE (the latter two in collaboration with Zoë Ryder White). Nicole also co-edited the Braving the Body anthology published by Harbor Editions in March 2024.
